What Strange Woman is Here? Laura Benedict’s Fieldwork among the Bagobos of Mindanao

On March 7, 2025, the Equality Development and Globalization Studies program at the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs hosted historian Juan Fernandez, Assistant Professor of Southeast Asian History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, for a powerful and evocative talk titled “What Strange Woman is Here?” Laura Benedict’s Fieldwork among the Bagobos of the Southern Philippines, 1906–1908.

In this meticulously researched lecture, Fernandez delved into the early twentieth-century fieldwork of Laura Watson Benedict, an American anthropologist whose contributions have long been eclipsed by the narrative of her physical and mental collapse during her time in Mindanao. For over a year between 1906 and 1908, Benedict immersed herself in the lives, rituals, and communities of the Bagobos—a group who were often sensationalized in colonial ethnography for their practices, including human sacrifice. Yet, as Fernandez compellingly argued, Benedict’s anthropological legacy deserves renewed attention not for her breakdown, but for her pioneering and deeply involved fieldwork shaped profoundly by gender and relational proximity.

Drawing from Benedict’s letters, published ethnographies, and rare archival photographs, Fernandez reconstructed a portrait of a woman who did not simply study a culture from a distance, but was invited into it. Benedict joined in sacred rituals, participated in moonlit processions, assisted with labor-intensive tasks like pottery making, and was even recognized with a seat of honor among Bagobo elites at the Ginum festival. Her immersive method, as Fernandez emphasized, prefigured a more relational, emotionally embedded style of ethnography—decades before Bronislaw Malinowski’s Argonauts of the Western Pacific would formalize the “native’s point of view” as central to anthropological method.

The talk also situated Benedict’s experiences within the larger colonial context, revealing how her gender simultaneously enabled unique access to Bagobo women's lives and exposed her to skepticism, isolation, and institutional disregard from her American peers. Benedict’s growing suspicion of local American hemp planters—whom she believed were destroying Bagobo traditions—was eventually dismissed as paranoia, leading to her forced removal from the field. Yet, as Fernandez showed, her perceptions echoed real upheavals in Bagobo life and reflected a rare ethical concern for indigenous sovereignty.

In showcasing Benedict’s ethnographic sensitivity and cultural integration, Fernandez’s lecture challenged audiences to reconsider the gendered and colonial dynamics that shape the production of anthropological knowledge. The event was richly illustrated with historical photographs, selections from Benedict’s own writing, and visuals from her published work Bagobo Ceremonial, Magic, and Myth (1916), offering attendees an intimate window into both the beauty and the tragedy of early fieldwork under empire.

This talk forms part of Fernandez’s broader book project, Becoming Natives/Becoming Anthropologists, which examines the intertwined roles of gender, identity, and colonial power in the shaping of American anthropological practice in the Philippines. His work invites a critical rethinking of how scholars came to know—and be known by—the communities they studied.